It’s no secret that we love Near Field Communication (NFC). What’s exciting at this point is watching some of the use cases come to fruition, and today in particular, the ability to replace security access badges with BlackBerry® smartphones. NFC is an innovative technology with many stakeholders and interested parties including enterprise customers, end users, financial institutions, carriers, and of course smartphone manufacturers. BlackBerry smartphones have been leading the way in mobile payments for some time, becoming the first smartphones to be certified by MasterCard® and Visa® for NFC-based payments, and now we’re first to be available as an access badge replacement solution. “RIM has proven to be a leader in NFC technology, and in bringing NFC solutions to market – we spearheaded the efforts in mobile payments. Now we are taking NFC beyond payments into the enterprise sector and partnering with HID Global®, an industry leader in physical access solutions” says Geoff MacGillivray, RIM Sr. Product Manager for NFC.

Late last week HID Global announced the availability of Secure Identity Services™, a comprehensive suite of web-based services for managing physical access credentials (read the HID press release for more info). Secure Identity Services is the enterprise’s first all-in-one web-based solution for credential provisioning and management. The platform provides businesses with the tools to create, use, and manage identities for traditional badges on plastic cards, for tokens, and for digital credentials on NFC-enabled BlackBerry smartphones beginning with models on the Verizon Wireless network: the BlackBerry® Bold™ 9930 and the BlackBerry® Curve™ 9370.